If you aren’t familiar with Western Digital’s new WD TV, get acclimated.  This little unit (and by little I do mean little, it’s not much larger than my 5 port gigabit switch ) is one killer device!  It runs $99 and can play every type of media you throw at it from x264 mkv files to divx to mp3s.  All available and output to your TV via HDMI in full 1080P HD resolution (the one main feature the AppleTV is missing, not to mention  it is more than double the price) .

Anyways, I recently took the plunge and purchased one of these (Thanks NewEgg!) after reading about how they run Linux and seeing the many modified firmware projects that are out there to further enhance the functionality.  Now out of the box this thing is still pretty sweet.  It has HDMI out, TOSLink (optical audio) out, and RCA out.  It also comes with 2 internal USB ports for local media attachment that can be expanded with a USB hub.  I tested this out of the box, and copied two test 1080P mkv files and they played flawlessly!  The one thing i know many of you are saying to yourself is… “Where is the nic?  No network port?”.  And this is where out of the box this media player fails.  However, enter the modified firmware projects!

Since this unit is built on Linux, a slew of modified firmware(s) that are available for the WD TV have surfaced.  They offer expanded functionality allowing you to add that network port you so desperately want so you can stream your huge media library!  Luckily that is the case, and with a simple $10 USB nic you can turn this player into one killer networked HD Media player!  I immediately got started and flashed my unit.
The flashing process to change your firmware is simple:

1. Use USB FLASH KEY from 64mb up to 2GB. I recommend up to 2GB but you could also use bigger ones but they could be using different addressing which could be issue for some models.
2. Format the USB FLASH key to FAT16 or FAT32 filesystem don’t be lazy and DON’T use NFTS for this case
3. Go to WDTV menu System→About  - There is version notice it you will need this number later.
4. Unpack firmware package to USB FLASH KEY to root directory there have to be 2 files WDTV.BIN and WDTV.VER.
5. Open with notepad or any plaintext editor and change version in WDTV.VER to something higher than what your WDTV is now.  If you don’t change this, it will not detect a new firmware.  Save the file.
6. Detach all USB devices from WDTV and unplug power supply.  Wait 5-10sec, plug-in USB prepared USB FLASH KEY and plug-in power supply.
7. Wait and don’t reboot WDTV during flashing process

Congratulations, you now have a modified WD TV with an enhanced Linux firmware!  Hopefully you also have a USB nic attached now too, so you can mount your NFS/CFIS/Samba shares to stream media!  Well go get started and check out the WDTV Cross Compiled  Software Repository for a plethora of applications such as asterisk (turn your WDTV into a full fledged PBX!), torrent-client, wget, mysql, php, ssh, screen, icq, perl, python, x11 and more!  I can see a lot of new uses for this little device, and the small footprint makes it great to take with me anywhere!

I’m sure it is only a matter of time before we starting seeing even more great hacks and apps coming out for this platform because of its open sourced nature.  I can see it now, asterisk running on the WD TV and I am watching a movie, which pauses, and a visual caller id pops up letting me know I have an incoming call and shows the caller id!  The possibilities are endless!

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.